Is wordsmithing passé in this experiential age?

I have accepted that proofreading has been devalued almost out of existence. I mourn its passing, but clearly spelling, grammar and punctuation are not the details that our culture, and this industry, choose to fret over any more. As long as its close enough that you get the idea, that’s sufficient.

But what about that careful crafting of language that we used to call “wordsmithing”?

As everything continues to accelerate, one of the tradeoffs we seem to be making in the pursuit of immediacy, freshness and so forth, is the thoughtful, well-considered construction of our communications. The idea itself, however germinally or sloppily expressed, has become more important than the most powerful or evocative articulation of the idea. When we have an idea, the task is now to express the idea as quickly as we can, in the first passably acceptable way that we can find. We settle for coherence, seldom holding out for finesse, nuance, dare I say, perfection.

Example: Those of you who call yourselves copywriters out there, when you write a headline, a banner ad, or some other one line articulation of your client’s message, once you come up with the idea, how much time do you spend on getting the exact articulation of your thought just right? Days? Hours? Minutes? Do you force yourself to write down two hundred, or even two dozen, variations in the quest to find the most compelling set of words? Or do you go with the first one that seems pretty good?

I know I’m guilty of caving into the pressures of time that have contributed to the erosion of wordsmithing. Where I once would have spent a full day sweating over a short paragraph of copy, I now spend, at most, half that amount of time. I’d like to think it’s because I’ve gotten better at my craft and work more efficiently these days. But, while that may be true, it’s just as true that I simply don’t work as hard, or as long, at the wordsmithing thing as I once did. No value is placed on my doing so, except by me, and I’m easily talked out of bothering, because I am a slug.

The ubiquity of email, text messaging and blogs has contributed mightily to this decline. It’s all about getting it down and getting it off to the recipient, rather than getting it just right.

Here’s another factor I’ve identified that I think is contributing to the waning of wordsmithing. As clients and agencies demand ideas of an interactive/engaging/experiential nature, the pressure is to come up with “experiential hooks”, which don’t demand such carefully crafted articulation. The heat is off, wordsmithing-wise. It is less the job of the words themselves to engage, involve, grab attention, and more the job of the experiential device.

This is an inevitable consequence of advertising’s shift to the interactive world of the web, and away from the more passive media—TV, radio, print.

For those of us who are better at words than experientials, it is a worrisome shift.